Diane Wakoski: Three New Poems from a Work in Progress

Diane Wakoski & Jerome Rothenberg: A Joint Portrait

Diane’s Personal Ghost Ranch 

I imagine riding a ghost-stallion, my

hair in braids, pinned on top on my head,

just like it was when I was seven, and sitting on the

school bus, with yellow ribbon-bows on a comb,

tucked under the braids to make a little crown. 

I imagine that on the Ghost Ranch I

will meet the Bluemoon Cowboy,

his silver-toed boots, glinting

under my bed.  Read me a story.

Read me one with poetry.  Please. 

On my ghost ranch, we will occasionally feel

the moonflower spirit of Georgia O’Keefe, but actually

she won’t be there.  She’s moved back to New York City,

to Brooklyn, where it’s hip and cool and edgy.

My ghost ranch is too quiet now,

and my ghosts way more misty than she’d crave with her bone sonnet vision;

we all give ghost sighs of sadness for ourselves because we know

Georgia never got old.

Her body parts are still mushroom-fleshed,

orchidious, and voluptuous enough

to live successfully in Brooklyn.

She sends us

Marianne Moore’s spritely but mourning ghost

because, of course,

the Dodgers aren’t in Brooklyn any more. 

At my ghost ranch, Miss Moore wears a crown

of moonflowers.  “They are actually ‘datura,’ she

would tell me. 

Sea Thrift & Gorse 

              “I saw myself in watery sunlight, divested of all obligations
              and connections, walking without luggage along a narrow road
              by a sandy bay, with sea thrift and gorse and a solitary pine.

                                              From Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan 

As if the sea is not the most extravagant

of all distributors, scattering everything that falls

into it!  Sea Thrift: an oxymoron, not like a pinched, Spartan bookkeeper

but growing exuberantly pink and sweet in marshes

or rocky gardens.

And Gorse,

yellow ragamuffin gypsy king, taking over

wherever it grows.  Yes, it’s life’s dessert:

to romanticize oneself as Sea Thrift and Gorse.

Life’s sugarplum.Its yellow jellybean. 

Names that are wishful, even deceptive, the satin slipper pinkness

of Sea Thrift, the melting-butter yellow flower

of Gorse cradled in brambles, or the royal cloaking purple cascade

of late spring Wisteria all suggest that          to name

displays our urge, not to be honest but          to  transform

the plain or ugly – a beautiful name, if not a beautiful body. 

My name, Diane, declares

Moon Goddess, it too an oxymoron

as I control nothing,

not tides, or madness, not lovers,

or night blooming flowers.  My name,

like so many names,

extravagantly, ironically, belies my organic or

celestial natures. 

I read novels and watch film

to become invisible, I suppose because I am not beautiful.

Instead, I am grasping, urgent,

the way wisteria vines twist around

spruce columns

holding up a covered deck, becoming

trunk

instead of sinew,

and gripping terrace wood

until it disappears without seeming even to splinter. 

Call me Diane, I say, wanting you to think of moonlight, not

not of a vine that crushes.  If I were a jellybean, I’d be the

green one that nobody likes. 

The Diamond Dog Follows Me to the Court of Ponce de Leon 

They announce me as a princess,

my little Diamond Dog tapping beside me,

unleashed, and I am wrapped and shod in silk tissue,

Curtained as if by dragonfly wings.  And someone says,

“Enough, give her the gift.” 

I am from Southern California,

the desert, yucca-belled, adobe-roofed, bougainvillea-cascaded, ice-

plant barricaded, so water is the gift

anticipated.  Lizards, a coach drawn by lizards: my favorite

detail from Cinderella’s transformation, but now I offer

my hand, waiting for a glass of water

so clear it will hold Youth, it will taste like

orange blossoms. 

First they call the Diamond Dog

and he runs to the king with a red crown.  Then,

they unwrap my dragonfly silks

and ask me to step out of my rose petal shoes.

Naked, I wait for my gift. 

The shower.

The Waterfall.

The geyser or

A sprinkle of drops,

A glassful?

But the gift is not water; it is

invisibility.  Not Youth,

but infinite age.

I vanish in the court of Ponce de Leon.

No one believes the Fountain exists, but if it doesn’t,

what was the gift?

[note.  It is now a few months over fifty years since the publication of Diane Wakoski’s first book, Coins and Coffins, by Hawk’s Well Press, the small press that I had established in the late 1950s along with Diane Rothenberg & David Antin.  Newly arrived in New York Wakoski was the first poet from the outside to truly join us, bringing with her an extraordinarily developed sense & practice of a poetry of the everyday that, in Robert Duncan’s words, “might be fantastic life.”  It was in this way, as I later wrote of her, that her work, while striking a note of the autobiographical — even to some ears (but not hers) the “confessional” — asserts the truth of an imaginal life that moves (at several of its remarkable [cosmological] peaks) toward what Keats spoke of as soul-making or world-making & Wallace Stevens as a “supreme fiction.”  Wakoski, then, in her own words: “I feel a body of poetry has its own separate and organic life, just as a human being does.  Conceiving of my poetry as a living organism, I began to conceive of it as a life.  Of course, what it was representative of was my fantasy life.  It drew from my own real life, but it began to have its own identity, its own life, and I felt that any life must have in it other people.”  And again: “In some ways I think of myself as a novelist in disguise, a mythologist — at least a storyteller, or a user of stories." Or, in a still larger frame — & as an indication too of what's stacked up against it: "Poetry is our history. / We study the stars / to understand temperatures. / Life and death are the only issues; / we often forget that — arranging our furniture, / washing our cars.”

               More of her recent poetry, which continues & progresses in the same vein, was posted earlier on Poems and Poetics & can be found here. (J.R.)]